eBay engineers collaborated with Google, allowing developers to carry a voice conversation on Google Home to a mobile phone. When the consumer tells Google Home that she wants to buy an item on eBay, it easily switches the conversation from the Home device to the phone.

Shopping hit a new record with the greatest number of online sales at $6.59 billion. Overall web traffic to retail sites rose nearly 12%, with mobile setting a new record representing 47.4% of visits led by smartphones at 39.9% and tablets by 7.6%.

Searching, streaming, and making purchases could look a whole lot different during the next Black Friday/Cyber Monday holiday weekend compared with years past. That's if the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rolls back net neutrality.

Using data from Google Trends, the maps show the states with the highest amount of searches for eight terms on desktop and mobile. Four have been averaged together for each shopping day. The terms analyzed were Black Friday deals, Black Friday deals 2017, Black Friday sales, Black Friday sales 2017, Cyber Monday deals, Cyber Monday deals 2017, Cyber Monday sales, and Cyber Monday sales 2017.

Publishers have developed workarounds -- AMP teaser pages that allow readers on mobile devices searching for content on google.com to find the content on regular pages, but click through from AMP-only sections on Google.

Although voice is the new user interface and search tool and a source of revenue for brands, the software behind hardware assistants doesn't always work. Eighty-five percent of respondents to a survey released by Invoca on Thursday said they would type keywords into an online search if the voice assistant couldn't produce adequate answers when buying a product or contacting a business.